Goldman Leads Zoomdata Investment Round

Investment banking juggernaut Goldman Sachs has led a $25 million equity-financing investment round in visual analytics specialist Zoomdata Inc.

Zoomdata, Redwood City, Calif., said Wednesday (Feb. 17) that new investor Comcast Ventures also joined the Series C funding round along with previous investors Accel Partners, Columbus Nova Technology Partners and New Enterprise Associates. Two Goldman Sach executives will join Zoomdata’s board of directors.

The startup’s visual analytics platform is designed to handle real-time streaming and historical data. Based on its patented data “sharpening” and micro-query technologies, the Zoomdata business intelligence platform can be deployed either on-premise or in the cloud. It’s Fusion tool is designed to join big data with other data stores while leveraging emerging micro-services to speed up delivery of visual analytics.

In the case of financial data, that can amount to billions of rows of data.

Rana Yared, managing director Goldman Sachs’ Principal Strategic Investments Group, said its investment in Zoomdata was tied to the growing need for “products that enable clients to extract real value through intelligent analysis of financial data.”

Zoomdata said it has so far raised $47.2 million in private investment since its launch in 2012. The startup previously launched a cloud-native analytics layer designed to deliver big data visual analytics via Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN), CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), Cisco Systems, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT) cloud platforms.

Along with Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), it recently added management consultant Deloitte and the insurer Markerstudy as new enterprise customers.

Zoomdata’s visual analytics platform also is optimized for Kudu, the new open source fast storage engine for Hadoop designed to boost analytics performance. Zoomdata released a smart connector for the in-memory data store last September with the intention of opening the Hadoop ecosystem to real-time analytics and building analytics applications to handle changing data.

In announcing a 11-fold year-on-year jump in booking earlier this month, the startup said its visual analytics platform is running in embedded applications at “petabyte scale in public clouds” and standalone in large datacenters.

The Zoomdata investment also illustrates the growing role of financial institutions like Goldman Sachs in promoting new open source IT infrastructure and data analytics technologies. Last year, for instance, the investment banker played a key role in resolving a dispute over application container specs.

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